


After the Bombs

by nerddowell



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5 + 1, Gen, Promises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 01:23:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4857875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A 5 + 1 drabble about Steve Rogers' promises, made, kept and broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Bombs

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to the Decemberists' _After the Bombs_ whilst writing this, hence both the title and the angst. Blame them.
> 
> Unbeta'd.

Your name is Steve Rogers, and you never break promises.

* * *

**1.**

Your ma asks you, when you're three years old and your Pa has just died; she asks you to stay with her always, because she can't lose you too, and you say yes because where would you go without her. You make the promise with your most solemn voice, and she's crying onto your cheeks as she holds you so tight you think you're going to burst. You rub them away with small hands and lay your head on her shoulder, and she rocks you to sleep beside the fire and you wake up in her bed the next morning and don't get up until her eyes open so she knows you didn't break it. You stayed, all night, by her, so you weren't lost.

**2.**

Your second promise is also to your Ma, because you've had the tar beaten out of you three times this past week and she's worried about you. You're small, skinny, like a gust of wind would blow you down like a hollow reed, but you stand up to the world with raised fists and you won't let it beat others down; you're a human shield for all the people who get hit and don't want to get up again, and you get pummelled for it. Your Ma makes you promise to look after yourself, and the fourth time you get hit - for interrupting three of the bigger kids herding one of your classmates into an alley, ready to give him the shakedown - you take yourself to the toilets at school and you wash your cuts and rinse your shirt. You come home soaking wet, shivering, and you catch a cold, but the blood is washed out and the cuts heal cleanly.

**3.**

You catch scarlet fever when you're fourteen and Bucky spends his weekend by your bedside, his hand on your brow and his eyes full of tears as your breath rattles and you burn with it. He begs you, throaty and raw, to stay - says if you die, he'll kill you (it makes you laugh, weak, and cough) - and you think back to what your Ma told you about being three. It seems like death makes people ask for a lot, and promise more; you've now got two people who, in your mind, you could never leave. The words come off your tongue as easy as anything, and even the priest by your bed reading you your rites doesn't make them any less true.

**4.**

You promise the doctor, the night before the experiment, when you're still the gust-of-wind scrap of dirty-blond Brooklyn, with the broken nose and the crackling lungs, and he drinks to it with his warm eyes and his careful gestures. You come out of that container twice the size, still weak on shaky new limbs. She's there, with wide eyes and flustered hands, and you throw yourself over her with no hesitation when those bullets start to rattle; just like you threw yourself over that grenade. Self-sacrifice is in your nature, part of your bloodstream, like the serum he gives you. You aren't perfect, but you are good.

**1 / 5**

You almost break a promise once. You watch him fall off that train, tuck your face into the metal so you don't have to see the end, you try to drown yourself in whiskey; you want to forget, to absolve yourself of the promise you think you failed to keep. But years later, he turns up, and you manage it again. The one fight you've ever backed down from; the one person you will never leave, so long as you live. To the end of the line, you promised, and he pulls you out of that river and you hunt for him until you find him in that factory, trapped and cornered, and you move heaven and earth to get him out.

**+1.**

The promise you don't keep is to her. You make her a promise, starting out as a sweet nothing, when he is dead-eyed and trembling behind you, and you make it again when he is gone and the plane is plummeting and you can almost feel the ice on your skin. You wake up in a world not yours, and you think of her, and you want to sleep again, sleep until everyone is gone and there are no more broken promises to live with. It makes you wonder, then, if ultimately he meant more than her, that you managed to keep that promise - whether love is something that draws you together, as you have been to him for years, or takes you apart, like the plane and the bombs and the war. You chased him into it, and you ran away from her with it.

* * *

Your first broken promise is your last.


End file.
